The Final Frontier

by Neil Clarke

  She stood staring at it for a good, long time. The source of all her problems, this thing—or, at least, that was a tempting excuse. Much better than all her problems coming from her, or from genetics, or from ontogenic accident. If it caused her problems, maybe it could damn well fix them.

  Of course, she couldn’t just hit it until it agreed.

  It and its memory, of people and things and places that all seemed to have so much more import than her haphazard little flight, her haphazard little life. All those people, coming into her brain and washing over her, more real to her than she was.

  Then it struck her.

  If this thing was meant to archive, then fine, it could archive her. Maybe she wasn’t fit to live. But she’d still be remembered by someone. Something.

  The thought appealed to her. Before she made a conscious choice, her body was already moving back to the seat.

  Bad idea. Yes, well, probably, but she wasn’t much use at having good ones. She growled to herself as she fit the connectors back against her scalp, but she’d decided; she was committed.

  She activated the interface, and memory became the air around her.

  Or—maybe not memory. Maybe just—

  A sense of place, so strong as to be overwhelming. The corridors of the accelerator, but more present and real than they had been as she stood in them. These flooded her awareness, denying distraction, constructing themselves in her mind.

  And in her mind, the man who looked like Tarsul materialized as though she’d simply forgotten that he’d been standing there.

  But Kiu knew where she was. She didn’t dissolve into it. Instead, she steeled herself, and spoke, with something that wasn’t her voice:

  “Who are you?”

  Kiu Alee, the apparition said. It didn’t sound like Tarsul; not entirely. Or maybe she just didn’t know him well enough to catch this tone. What an absolutely useless question.

  She had no sense of her body, here. She couldn’t lash out. She couldn’t feel her chest tighten, her breath draw in, her jaw and hands clench. It was freeing, in a way. It was also a little like death.

  “Okay, then.” She couldn’t take a deep breath. Couldn’t relax her muscles. And yet, she could still feel anger, like a sensation in a phantom limb. “Here’s one: why can’t I fly this thing right?”

  Much more useful. Unfortunately, much more complicated. The not-Tarsul turned eyes on her: blank, flat, and still piercing. You are not entirely similar to pilots in the past.

  No lip to curl. No teeth to grit, as she considered say saying, No, I’m one of those accidents that happen from time to time. What a waste of resources; what a waste of implants. If the Agisa medics could have pulled the filaments out of her brain and left them salvageable in any meaningful way, they probably would have.

  Instead, she found herself here.

  But it is an opportunity to learn, the apparition said. I appreciate the chance to analyze your augments. And to analyze you. Of the two, you are more interesting.

  Slow realization crept through her. “You’re not a memory,” she said. “Are you?”

  You aren’t accessing the archived memories, not-Tarsul responded. I understand the interface controls are erratic on your side, as well. Still, you chose how this interface was calibrated.

  “You’re the engine,” Kiu said. “You’re the ship.”

  An acceptable explanation.

  And that—all the questions she could ask, like who made you or where did you come from, vanished under the tide of annoyance. “You know where you’re going,” Kiu said. “Clearly, you have some kind of intelligence. Why can’t you just fly yourself home?”

  Calculations, it said, but Kiu thought there was a coyness to the answer. A slight tinge of lie. Organic processors handle some calculations better.

  “If you needed organic processing, your builders could have grown a neural web on a substrate.”

  Before she could finish the thought, she was answered—Well, just so. And once a human is connected, why not keep a piece for analysis?

  Kiu jerked.

  And then she dove, back down toward her body, coming back to the surface of her consciousness with her hands on the connectors. But then the quick-trigger affront died back, just enough to let her close her eyes again, search for the connection.

  “You’re copying my neuron structure? Culling it? Replicating it?” Even in Agisa, that wouldn’t have been possible. But moving a planetoid wouldn’t be possible, either. Nor would moving anything but information at this ridiculous speed.

  Not as you suspect it, the accelerator responded. Your neuron structure, even with its augments, is not deterministic as to your experiential reality. I expand myself. But if you connected looking for immortality, pilot, all you’ll receive is approximation. Still, this is valuable to me. Whether or not it is valuable to you hardly matters.

  She could have laughed. “Story of my life, isn’t it?”

  Well, it said. Keep coming back. So far as the story of your life goes, it will matter here more than anywhere.

  That didn’t sound like something Kiu was meant to understand. She moved past it. “If you study my augments, will you course correct? Is that what you need?”

  No, the accelerator said. That, I’d do for my own interest.

  “Wonderful. Great.” This thing’s intelligence was entirely unhelpful. “Can you just tell me why you won’t go home?”

  Kiu Alee, the accelerator said. Why won’t you let me?

  Kiu worked her body as hard as she could, after disconnecting. Made circuits of the halls, pushed and pulled against fixed points, did stretches and fast motions until she was gasping air. It bled off some of the boiling energy, if not all of it.

  She came to Tarsul in the console room, a far-flung little space full of screens which he disregarded. She was almost too exhausted for rage, mostly just too cynical for anything. Tarsul tilted his head to acknowledge her entry.

  “We are still not on course,” he said. He sounded resigned. “I admit, I’m surprised. I don’t know of any pilot who . . . experienced this much difficulty.”

  “I’m special,” Kiu said, voice heavy. “My brain doesn’t work right. Ace choice in pilots, though.”

  Tarsul turned to better regard her. His face, in that three-quarters turn, looked drawn and pensive. Kiu could almost hear the retort on his tongue: I had no choice.

  Yeah, well. Seemed to be a common complaint, here.

  Kiu glared at him for a while, and then softened, despite herself. Raw deal for him; surrounded by all this wonder, and he had a murderer with a broken brain on one side, a starving arcology so hidebound they needed a planet brought to them on the other. And hour after hour, he just kept doing what was in front of him to do.

  Kiu felt a stabbing moment of powerlessness, of the attendant rage. She fought it back down.

  “I can try again,” she said. “One more course correction, right? No harm in trying.”

  “No harm,” Tarsul agreed. Kiu wondered if, behind that easy agreement, he was already writing her off.

  “Yeah,” she said, and went back down the hall. After a moment, Tarsul followed her.

  Maybe she’d go into the connection and not come out. Maybe she’d let Tarsul sedate her and let the accelerator mine her brain and learn her augments and maybe she would learn the command that would set their course correctly. Maybe that was the option left to her.

  What had Tarsul said? It’s adaptive to fight when one’s life is at risk. Well, throwing a punch wouldn’t save her, so maybe she should stop trying to throw the first punch. Maybe she should find something to pre-empt the violence that waited on the other side of every heartbeat. Maybe this was it.

  “I think I can do this,” she lied.

  “I’m heartened,” Tarsul said.

  Maybe it was Kiu’s imagination, but he sounded like he had as little faith in her as she did.

  No matter.

  She went back to the interface. Lowered hersel
f into the chair.

  Tarsul tilted his head at her. “You seem different,” he said. His voice was curious. Maybe a shade wary.

  I don’t know if I’ve given up on life or had a breakthrough, Kiu didn’t say. Maybe a breakdown. She grunted, vaguely, in reply.

  “Are you well?” Tarsul asked.

  “Fine. I’m always fine.”

  She reached for the interface wires, and pulled them down toward her head.

  Tarsul was hesitating, as though he had something he wasn’t sure he should say. Kiu paused with her hands on the wires, and raised an eyebrow she knew he couldn’t see.

  Whatever internal line of thought had occupied Tarsul wended its way to a close. “I wish you luck,” he said.

  “Huh,” Kiu responded.

  Then she attached the connectors, breathed out, and opened up, and surrendered herself to going home.

  Greg Egan has published more than sixty short stories and thirteen novels. He has won a Hugo Award for his novella “Oceanic” and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel Permutation City. His most recent novel is Dichronauts, set in a universe with two time-like dimensions.

  GLORY

  GREG EGAN

  1.

  An ingot of metallic hydrogen gleamed in the starlight, a narrow cylinder half a meter long with a mass of about a kilogram. To the naked eye it was a dense, solid object, but its lattice of tiny nuclei immersed in an insubstantial fog of electrons was one part matter to two hundred trillion parts empty space. A short distance away was a second ingot, apparently identical to the first, but composed of antihydrogen.

  A sequence of finely tuned gamma rays flooded into both cylinders. The protons that absorbed them in the first ingot spat out positrons and were transformed into neutrons, breaking their bonds to the electron cloud that glued them in place. In the second ingot, antiprotons became antineutrons.

  A further sequence of pulses herded the neutrons together and forged them into clusters; the antineutrons were similarly rearranged. Both kinds of cluster were unstable, but in order to fall apart they first had to pass through a quantum state that would have strongly absorbed a component of the gamma rays constantly raining down on them. Left to themselves, the probability of their being in this state would have increased rapidly, but each time they measurably failed to absorb the gamma rays, the probability fell back to zero. The quantum Zeno effect endlessly reset the clock, holding the decay in check.

  The next series of pulses began shifting the clusters into the space that had separated the original ingots. First neutrons, then antineutrons, were sculpted together in alternating layers. Though the clusters were ultimately unstable, while they persisted they were inert, sequestering their constituents and preventing them from annihilating their counterparts. The end point of this process of nuclear sculpting was a sliver of compressed matter and antimatter, sandwiched together into a needle one micron wide.

  The gamma ray lasers shut down, the Zeno effect withdrew its prohibitions. For the time it took a beam of light to cross a neutron, the needle sat motionless in space. Then it began to burn, and it began to move.

  The needle was structured like a meticulously crafted firework, and its outer layers ignited first. No external casing could have channeled this blast, but the pattern of tensions woven into the needle’s construction favored one direction for the debris to be expelled. Particles streamed backward; the needle moved forward. The shock of acceleration could not have been borne by anything built from atomic-scale matter, but the pressure bearing down on the core of the needle prolonged its life, delaying the inevitable.

  Layer after layer burned itself away, blasting the dwindling remnant forward ever faster. By the time the needle had shrunk to a tenth of its original size it was moving at ninety-eight percent of light-speed; to a bystander this could scarcely have been improved upon, but from the needle’s perspective there was still room to slash its journey’s duration by orders of magnitude.

  When just one thousandth of the needle remained, its time, compared to the neighboring stars, was passing two thousand times more slowly. Still the layers kept burning, the protective clusters unraveling as the pressure on them was released. The needle could only reach close enough to light-speed to slow down time as much as it required if it could sacrifice a large enough proportion of its remaining mass. The core of the needle could survive only for a few trillionths of a second, while its journey would take two hundred million seconds as judged by the stars. The proportions had been carefully matched, though: out of the two kilograms of matter and antimatter that had been woven together at the launch, only a few million neutrons were needed as the final payload.

  By one measure, seven years passed. For the needle, its last trillionths of a second unwound, its final layers of fuel blew away, and at the moment its core was ready to explode it reached its destination, plunging from the near-vacuum of space straight into the heart of a star.

  Even here, the density of matter was insufficient to stabilize the core, yet far too high to allow it to pass unhindered. The core was torn apart. But it did not go quietly, and the shock waves it carved through the fusing plasma endured for a million kilometers: all the way through to the cooler outer layers on the opposite side of the star. These shock waves were shaped by the payload that had formed them, and though the initial pattern imprinted on them by the disintegrating cluster of neutrons was enlarged and blurred by its journey, on an atomic scale it remained sharply defined. Like a mold stamped into the seething plasma it encouraged ionized molecular fragments to slip into the troughs and furrows that matched their shape, and then brought them together to react in ways that the plasma’s random collisions would never have allowed. In effect, the shock waves formed a web of catalysts, carefully laid out in both time and space, briefly transforming a small corner of the star into a chemical factory operating on a nanometer scale.

  The products of this factory sprayed out of the star, riding the last traces of the shock wave’s momentum: a few nanograms of elaborate, carbon-rich molecules, sheathed in a protective fullerene weave. Traveling at seven hundred kilometers per second, a fraction below the velocity needed to escape from the star completely, they climbed out of its gravity well, slowing as they ascended.

  Four years passed, but the molecules were stable against the ravages of space. By the time they’d traveled a billion kilometers they had almost come to a halt, and they would have fallen back to die in the fires of the star that had forged them if their journey had not been timed so that the star’s third planet, a gas giant, was waiting to urge them forward. As they fell toward it, the giant’s third moon moved across their path. Eleven years after the needle’s launch, its molecular offspring rained down onto the methane snow.

  The tiny heat of their impact was not enough to damage them, but it melted a microscopic puddle in the snow. Surrounded by food, the molecular seeds began to grow. Within hours, the area was teeming with nanomachines, some mining the snow and the minerals beneath it, others assembling the bounty into an intricate structure, a rectangular panel a couple of meters wide.

  From across the light-years, an elaborate sequence of gamma ray pulses fell upon the panel. These pulses were the needle’s true payload, the passengers for whom it had merely prepared the way, transmitted in its wake four years after its launch. The panel decoded and stored the data, and the army of nanomachines set to work again, this time following a far more elaborate blueprint. The miners were forced to look farther afield to find all the elements that were needed, while the assemblers labored to reach their goal through a sequence of intermediate stages, carefully designed to protect the final product from the vagaries of the local chemistry and climate.

  After three months’ work, two small fusion-powered spacecraft sat in the snow. Each one held a single occupant, waking for the first time in their freshly minted bodies, yet endowed with memories of an earlier life.

  Joan switched on her communications console. Anne appeared on
the screen, three short pairs of arms folded across her thorax in a posture of calm repose. They had both worn virtual bodies with the same anatomy before, but this was the first time they had become Noudah in the flesh.

  “We’re here. Everything worked,”Joan marveled. The language she spoke was not her own, but the structure of her new brain and body made it second nature.

  Anne said, “Now comes the hard part.”

  “Yes.” Joan looked out from the spacecraft’s cockpit. In the distance, a fissured blue-gray plateau of water ice rose above the snow. Nearby, the nanomachines were busy disassembling the gamma ray receiver. When they had erased all traces of their handiwork they would wander off into the snow and catalyze their own destruction.

  Joan had visited dozens of planet-bound cultures in the past, taking on different bodies and languages as necessary, but those cultures had all been plugged into the Amalgam, the metacivilization that spanned the galactic disk. However far from home she’d been, the means to return to familiar places had always been close at hand. The Noudah had only just mastered interplanetary flight, and they had no idea that the Amalgam existed. The closest node in the Amalgam’s network was seven light-years away, and even that was out of bounds to her and Anne now: they had agreed not to risk disclosing its location to the Noudah, so any transmission they sent could be directed only to a decoy node that they’d set up more than twenty light-years away.

  “It will be worth it,” Joan said.

  Anne’s Noudah face was immobile, but chromatophores sent a wave of violet and gold sweeping across her skin in an expression of cautious optimism. “We’ll see.” She tipped her head to the left, a gesture preceding a friendly departure.

  Joan tipped her own head in response, as if she’d been doing so all her life. “Be careful, my friend,” she said.

  “You too.”

  Anne’s ship ascended so high on its chemical thrusters that it shrank to a speck before igniting its fusion engine and streaking away in a blaze of light. Joan felt a pang of loneliness; there was no predicting when they would be reunited.